These 5 States Have the Most Full-Time Telecommuters in the US

Want to work from home? You’re in luck. Telecommuting has increased 103 percent over the past 10 years, according to a Global Workplace Analyticsanalysis of U.S. Census data, and that’s not counting self-employed workers. Last year, telecommuting grew by 6.5 percent. In fact, 3.7 million employees (2.5 percent of the workforce) currently work from home part-time or more. If you want to work from home every day, however, where you live might make a difference. FlexJobs recently revisited the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data to determine which states have the most full-time telecommuters.

Curious about why some states are better than others for telecommuters? After all, if you can work from home, it follows that you should be able to do so from any location. But even full-time telecommuting jobs often come with stipulations about where workers live, either due to legal reasons or to make life easier in terms of occasional in-person training sessions or client meetings.

Still other work-from-home jobs are part-time telecommuting situations, in which workers spend a portion of their time working at an office location, and the rest at home in their jammies. Before you turn your nose up at these “work-from-home … sometimes” jobs, keep in mind that there are often more of them available; 15 to 20 million people had jobs that allowed them to work part of the time at home in 2012, as opposed to 2.8 million workers who toiled at home exclusively during that same year, according to FlexJobs. By broadening your search to include gigs that require you to put in some face-time at the office, you might find the telecommuting job of your dreams.

For more on the states with the most telecommuters, see the full list, here.

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Jen Hubley Luckwaldt

Jen Hubley Luckwaldt writes about work-life balance, stress management, and other topics relating to what makes us happy at work. A full-time freelancer, she deals with stress by blurring the lines between life and work to the point where the two spheres are barely separate. The happiest day of her career was when scientists proved that looking at pictures of cute animals makes us more productive.